Alex Queiroz wrote:
If the first step in writing your own
monotone front-end was "call the Lua parser", it would make writing
front-ends a major headache. Particularly for people not writing their
front-end in C.
Why is that different from having to call the JSON parser?
Because there are implementations of JSON for all popular (and many
unpopular) languages. Already we have front-ends for monotone
written in many exotic languages*: OCaml, Ruby, Java, Perl, and
Python. All these languages have reference implementations of JSON,
wheras none of them have implementations of Lua. Worst-case, if there
were no reference implementation of JSON for your chosen language, and
you were forced to write the parser yourself,
writing a JSON parser is far more approachable than writing a Lua
parser.
Also, Lua is an entire scripting language, and as such has a much more
complicated API than JSON. So the setup code to parse some Lua input
would be far more complicated than the equivalent code to setup parsing
JSON. Of course, this could be hidden in a library, but again such a
library would almost certainly be written in C (or C++) and hard to use
from other languages.
larry
* In fact, it looks like none of the tools listed on montone's
"GUIs/other tools" page was written in C! I guess anyone who'd use monotone
these days is already far enough off the beaten path that they don't
mind living on the leading edge of linguistic civilization.
|